A couple weeks ago, I moved to Windows 10 with the new laptop I received (Dell 5510 32GB RAM), configuring it for dual boot mode with Ubuntu 16.04 LTS.
I was just about to install
Cygwin in Windows again, and then remembered a Microsoft
announcement from about a year ago.
Here's the new landing page for running bash on Ubuntu for Windows:
https://msdn.microsoft.com/commandline/wsl/about
If you are interested in using this developer feature, I recommend watching the 16-minute video at the above link. A demo is provided, as well as an architectural explanation of how this all works.
In order to turn this feature on, you''ll need to follow the instructions at the following link:
The last step takes a bit of time to complete, and the output looks like this:
C:\Users\erik.gfesser>bash
— Beta feature —
This will install Ubuntu on Windows, distributed by Canonical
and licensed under its terms available here:
https://aka.ms/uowterms
Type "y" to continue: y
Downloading from the Windows Store… 100%
Extracting filesystem, this will take a few minutes…
Please create a default UNIX user account. The username does not need to match your Windows username.
For more information visit: https://aka.ms/wslusers
Enter new UNIX username: egfesser
Enter new UNIX password:
Retype new UNIX password:
passwd: password updated successfully
Installation successful!
The environment will start momentarily…
Documentation is available at: https://aka.ms/wsldocs
egfesser@CENABCD-PRE:/mnt/c/Users/erik.gfesser$
Microsoft is still working to expand the available Linux functionality (what is offered here is a subset), but hey as far as I'm concerned it's worth the install just to get the grep command for searching files.
What jogged my memory about the earlier post are some presentations that some folks from Microsoft gave at a Chicago client the other day.
Microsoft does seem to be working hard to expand / hang on to its market share. In joking with the folks from Microsoft, they freely admitted that a lot of what is made available in Azure was built using concepts and open source products under the covers that many of us are already familiar with from the Java world.